About: Alexander Riding's art autocracy, Lost Dance Project (AKA Danse Perdue) exhibits work about intimacy and limit experience. He has performed and taught butoh dance, exhibited art and installations and given readings in the United States, Russia, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. He would like someone to help him publish 3-5 books. He runs the Psychomachia Theater with Vanessa Skantze.

Bio: Alexander Riding, 1977, is an artist and performer; the body of his work is about intimacy, mutations of love and intimacy, holding intimate time and space, limits of the mind and body, and the poetry that comes from exposing or being exposed by these limits. His writing, painting and sculpture collections are entitled the Book of Total Darkness - Literature of a Butoh Dancer, Revelations of Two Stupid Continentals and Grinder Family Archives.

His performance work incorporates butoh dance, theater, installation, literature, and altered states like Hysteria, prisons, obsessive compulsive disorders, bloodletting, love. He has co-directed the performance group, Lost Dance Project, AKA Danse Perdue since 2002, and the Teatro de la Psychomachia (a theater, art and workshop studio located in Seattle, U.S.A.), since 2010. Since 2005, he has performed, taught and exhibited works in different places in the United States, and, often by the grace of Flavia Ghisalberti, or the people of Spazio Nu, in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Russia (where he and Flavia were hosted by Poema Theater and Odddance). He was also a Founding Member of Daipanbutoh, and has helped organize and host butoh festivals and countless performances in Seattle and New Orleans, as well as the tri-national Butoh Off festival created by Flavia Ghisalberti, that takes place bi-annually in Switzerland, France and Germany. Moeno Wakamatsu, Masaki Iwana, Flavia Ghisalberti and Atsushi Takenouchi are important artists for him.

Artwork must be intrinsically unconsumable, problematic, unsettling, in other words, a living relationship. Failing this, an object has failed to reach a state of art-ness, its grace.

Stressed material that does not achieve this immaterial value has less value than the original, unformed material, before it was degenerated by the hands that turned a part of nature into something consumable, something dead.